EVENTS

Proxy

A woman in India sought to enact revenge on her daughter’s rapist, so she got four men, including her own husband, to gang rape the wife of the accused man.

According to reports, the revenge rape, which happened in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, India on Sunday, left the accused rapist’s wife struggling for life on the side of a road.

The mother of the teenage girl that was originally raped allegedly called on three men and her husband to rape the wife of her daughter’s rapist in retaliation for the crime. The four men wound up abducting the woman, taking her to an area near a police station in a neighboring village, and gang raped her.

Later on, the men drove the raped woman to an area along the side of a road where they dumped her and fled the scene. The woman was discovered by villagers and brought to the hospital where she is now reportedly in critical condition.

Comments

So, even in the face of such atrocity, the indoctrination of Menz being superior (TM) is so strong that instead of exacting revenge (which I can at least understand) on the man who did it, the wife is picked?

I think it’s not so much damaging their property, as it is damaging their “honor” – and specifically the man’s “honor.” In honor cultures rape is something done to the male owner of the woman’s genitalia, rather than something done to the woman. By raping the woman the rapist owns, they shame the rapist.

Ya, I didn’t mean to say Sastra was wrong, but that I think the honor-shame aspect is a good deal more intense. Does that seem right, Kausik? Just destroying some property wouldn’t seem like revenge in the way that shaming the man by raping away his honor does. Honor/shame are more personal and emotional, more hot, more charged. Does that make sense?

Some years ago I used to read a blog by an Indian blogger who blogged about Indian politics and society etc. One commenter had seriously suggested that a just punishment for rapists would be to have their sisters raped in retaliation. So that the rapists would ‘know how it feels’ blah blah.

I seem to remember that Mukhtar Mai’s rape (in Pakistan) years ago had also been ordered by the village council as punishment for her brother’s supposed transgression (no proof that it was more than a flirtation) with a different-caste girl.

I can’t stop imagining the ‘people’ involved chuckling to each other a decade later saying “remember when we taught that bitch a lesson? Good times”.

I think Ophelia is right. The only way this kind of behaviour can be made to make sense to…well, sadistic fucktangles, is ‘honour’. The woman doesn’t signify. She doesn’t count. She’s to be used to punish the man and that’s totally justified. It doesn’t matter at all that she did nothing wrong. She’s not really a person, she’s a possession of the man. Violating that possession is a proxy for punishing the man. That ‘punishment’ exists only in a world where you let it and where the punishment is more important than the crime.

If my wife were raped, I’d like to think our families would prioritise looking after her. I wouldn’t want revenge on the rapist, let alone by proxy the rapist’s wife. I’d want my wife to heal. How fucking distorted can humanity get when impotent revenge fantasies are no longer impotent because there’s a crowd for hire?

The victim’s MOTHER recruits her husband and 3 other men to take revenge against an innocent party. Note that nothing is said about the original victim’s FATHER. So how was his ‘honor’ involved? And if it wasn’t a motive for him, what was? To what extent is this vicious misogyny perpetuated by women?

Even in the warped maze of ‘honor’ this makes no sense. But then, it never does. That’s the wonder of ‘honor.’ You get to play at being all feudal and noble, while NEVER challenging power or showing real courage.

This is barbaric. That humans can even think of doing this is a shame to us all.

exi5tentialist should come over to this thread and explain to us all how we are hypocritically enforcing western norms of justice by criticizing this and refusing to criticize overreaches of sex offender registries. And then ignoring our criticisms of sex offender registries.

I now remember reading an analysis/comparison between “cultures of honor” and “cultures of law.” From memory, the “cultures of honor” exist where there is weak law enforcement and where filing a formal complaint with the authorities tends to do diddly squat. Thus, one must enforce the “law” on one’s own. Cultures of law respect the law, which is widely and (ideally) impartially enforced.

Notice that even just this much of an analysis clearly points to what infrastructure needs to be established in order to stop this primitive savagery. Let’s make it easier for them to evolve to human, shall we?

From the viewpoint of anthropologists, cultures of honour typically appear among nomadic peoples and herdsmen who carry their most valuable property with them and risk having it stolen, without having recourse to law enforcement or to government. In this situation, inspiring fear forms a better strategy than promoting friendship; and cultivating a reputation for swift and disproportionate revenge increases the safety of one’s person and property. Thinkers ranging from Montesquieu to Steven Pinker have remarked upon the mindset needed for a culture of honour.

Cultures of honour therefore appear among the Bedouin, and the Scottish and English herdsmen of the Border country, and many similar peoples, who have little allegiance to a national government; among cowboys, frontiersmen, and ranchers of the American West, where official law-enforcement often remained out of reach, as is famously depicted and celebrated in Westerns; among the plantation culture of the U.S. Southern states, and among aristocrats, who enjoy hereditary privileges that put them beyond the reach of codes of law. Cultures of honour also flourish in criminal underworlds and gangs, whose members carry large amounts of cash and contraband and cannot seek legal redress if it is stolen.

Cultures of honour will often arise when three conditions exist:

– A scarcity of resources
– The benefit of theft and crime outweighs the risks
– A lack of sufficient law enforcement (such as in geographically remote regions)

Historically, cultures of honour exist in places where the herding of animals dominates an economy. In this situation the geography is usually extensive since the soil cannot support extensive sustained farming and thus large populations; the benefit of stealing animals from other herds is high since it is the main form of wealth; and there is no central law-enforcement or rule of law. However cultures of honour can also appear in places like modern inner-city slums. The three conditions exist here as well: lack of resources (poverty); crime and theft have a high rewards compared to the alternatives (few); and law enforcement is generally lax or corrupt.

Once a culture of honour exists in a society, its members find it difficult to make the transition to a culture of law; this requires that people become willing to back down and refuse to immediately retaliate, and from the viewpoint of the culture of honour, this tends to appear to be an unwise act reflecting weakness.